In a flash of a generation, our world has harboured an extra billion people. Books from twenty years ago, giving population estimates, Africa 500 million, India 800 million are now outdated. (Mind you, so are books outdated as well.)
This is not a birthday or milestone to celebrate. With the world hitting maximum capacity, this century will be defined by tugging and pulling for resources, which will become scarcer and scarcer, leading to more conflict.
How did we hit this red line? Is it a rise in population growth through longer life expectancies? Is it increased birth rates? It is a mixture of everything, but the cause of sharp increase lies in the hands of growing countries like China and India. The western world's population, all things relative, has hardly grown. Of the billion people added to our planet in the past twenty years, Europe had an meager increase of only 1% to this billion figure.
India and China are the main population centres of the world today. In fact, the most common looking human being is a 28 year old Han (Chinese ethnicity) male. There are 9 million people who match that exact profile.
An almost instinctive reaction to this demographic threat is to encourage forced population control as they partially do in China, stop large families, tax breaks for smaller ones and so on. While this may sound enticing, it is not going to solve our resources problem. The developing world is not to blame for our increasingly rationed resources. Consumers in America and Europe can waste up to a 100kg of food per person per year. In Africa, that figure is 6 to 11 kgs per year.
The real menace to our future is a growing population in the east coupled with an increasing universal standard of living. What will happen when the Chinese find western tastes of having massive cruise liner holidays, with dozens of ships leaving from Macau a day, wasting tons of everything from smoked salmon to watermelons?
This 7 billion mark is astounding but also may trigger new innovations. Perhaps it will force an industrial renaissance of re-usable energy and create streamlined efficiencies in the way we consume goods. Or maybe, the exact opposite will occur. A global village, where overcrowding will lead to pushing and shoving, will become a far more fragmented place, with each clan scrounging for its own food security and general stability. Our environment could react to us as a hostile alien where pandemics will be the only way to bring back an environmental equilibrium. We have seen this with avian and swine flu already in the past few years. What's not to say that this is just the start.
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